Portable aerosol tire sealer and inflator kits are well known for use in an emergency to inflate and temporarily seal a pneumatic tire with a puncture wound when a service station or other repair facility is not available to a motorist. The use of the product, typically for an automobile, allows the motorist to drive the vehicle to a convenient location where the punctured tire can be inspected and repaired. The repair kit obviates the need for a motorist to remove the punctured tire from an automobile and replace it with a spare tire in order to reach a service station or the like for repair of the damaged tire. Perhaps even more importantly, use of the portable tire repair kit obviates the inconvenience and danger of being stranded on the road with a punctured tire if the motorist either does not have a spare tire or is physically unable to replace the punctured tire with a spare tire.
At the present time, all commercial tire repair kits known to applicant utilize a water-based adhesive as the sealing component of the composition and either a hydrocarbon propellant (such as propane, butane, and/or isobutane) or a chlorofluorocarbon propellant (such as Freon 12). Generally speaking, these tire repair kit products all suffer some relative shortcomings in that the hydrocarbon propellants are flammable and the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) propellants have been found to have a detrimental effect on the earth's ozone layer and use thereof is being severely restricted. As a result of these factors, there is a need for a new tire sealant and inflator composition for tire repair kits which is nonflammable and which poses less of a threat to the ozone in the stratosphere above the earth ("environment friendly").
The present invention provides a new anhydrous, nonflammable tire sealant and inflator composition which represents an improvement in such compositions since it is not flammable and it does not utilize ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) as the inflation component.